Party of One

As a radio host, Michael Savage is a heretic among heretics, as contemptuous of fellow right-wing stars as he is of liberal politics.Illustration by Philip Burke

On January 20th, at around 12:04 P.M., the nation’s conservative talk-show hosts once again became the voice of the resistance. Many of them had spent eight years grappling with the vexing Presidency of George W. Bush, so when Barack Obama was sworn in they suddenly found themselves freed from the inhibiting effects of ambivalence. A liberal new President had joined the familiar array of villains in the House and the Senate, and although none of the big-name talk-show hosts celebrated this development, all of them seemed energized by it. Sean Hannity, who had generally been supportive of Bush, coined a spiffy new slogan to reflect the changed political climate: “The Conservative Underground, the Home of Conservatism in Exile.” Rush Limbaugh, who sometimes criticized Bush during his second term, quickly realized that the defeat of the Republican Party would only enhance his stature as a rousing speechmaker, unconstrained by electoral politics. (After Limbaugh said, of President Obama, “I hope he fails,” the Obama Administration and its allies found it useful to declare Limbaugh the unofficial leader of the Republican Party; in May, Limbaugh announced his resignation with mock solemnity, saying, “I was appointed without my acquiescence.”) And on January 19th, the day before the Inauguration, the radio and television host Glenn Beck launched a nightly show on Fox News, deftly channelling the defiance and bewilderment of dissident America.

Even in this world of born-again refuseniks, Michael Savage is an anomaly: a heretic among heretics, nearly as contemptuous of his fellow radio stars (he refers to Limbaugh as “the golfer,” and calls Beck “the hemorrhoid with eyes”) as he is of President Obama. He calls himself a “gen-yoo-wine independent conservative,” which is a kind of sales pitch—and, apparently, an effective one. His daily broadcast, “The Savage Nation,” is one of the most popular talk shows in the country. The magazine Talkers ranks Savage third on its “Heavy Hundred” list, behind only Limbaugh and Hannity, and estimates that he reaches more than eight million listeners weekly.

What he gives those listeners is one of the most addictive programs on radio, and one of the least predictable. San Francisco is his adopted home town (he calls it “San Fransicko,” a nickname that may or may not be affectionate, depending on the context and his mood), but he delivers his analysis and his anecdotes in a vinegary New York accent, occasionally seasoned with Yiddish, and this voice alone conveys something of the nostalgia he feels for his boyhood in the Bronx and Queens, in the forties and fifties. He is quick to anger, and often provides evidence of his firm belief that political understatement is overrated, as when he mentioned, in passing, that President Obama was “dragging us by the neck into the neo-Marxist nation of the new Venezuela.” He yields to no one in his disdain for liberals (he once wrote a book called “Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder”), not to mention illegal immigrants, fraudulent food-stamp recipients, Judge Sotomayor (“a stone-hearted racist and a narcissist”), gay-rights activists, the Congressional Black Caucus, and, for that matter, our national pastime. (“I still can’t believe that in this day and age an adult would go to a baseball game,” he says, adding, suggestively, that baseball is very popular in Communist Cuba.)

Just about any news story leads him back to his central thesis: that lefties are ruining the world, or trying to. After a Somali pirate was captured and brought to New York for trial, he told listeners to expect a backlash: “Some terrorist front from Milwaukee’s Somali community, in my opinion, is already saying, ‘He’s a child! He shouldn’t be judged, already, as a man.’ I haven’t seen Al Sharpton, yet, calling him an environmental warrior. I haven’t seen Jesse Jackson saying, ‘We’ve linked arms; we shall overcome.’ But don’t be shocked.” Television viewers may still remember Savage’s brief, unhappy tenure on MSNBC, which ended after he responded to a prank caller by saying, “Oh, you’re one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig.” And earlier this year he found himself at the center of a strange international incident, after the British government announced—seemingly out of the blue—that he was on a list of twenty-two “hate promoters” who had recently been banned from entering the country. On his show that day, he played “God Save the Queen,” by the Sex Pistols, and said, “The punks had it right—there is no future in England.”

This punk-rock interlude would not have surprised Savage’s regular listeners, who know him to be, more days than not, a marvellous storyteller, a quirky thinker, and an incorrigible free-associater. He sometimes sounds less like a political commentator than like the star of a riveting and unusually vivid one-man play (he frequently dumps callers, even sympathetic ones, after about a sentence and a half), or a fugitive character out of a Philip Roth novel. Savage seems resigned to the fact that the majority of Americans, including many of his own listeners, just don’t get it—just don’t get him—and never will. He is a permanent resident of the political wilderness, sending daily dispatches back to the diseased civilization that the rest of us call home.

When President Obama went to Britain for the G-20 summit, Savage devoted a good portion of his show to the dinner menu. He scoffed at the vegetarian options (“That must be the Obama people”), wondered aloud whether a Bakewell tart was “a lady from one of the side streets,” and expounded upon his hatred for Irish soda bread, saying, “I don’t know what the big deal is—it’s full of butter and cream, yuck. Very high rate of heart attack in Ireland.” All this talk about food made him think about dinner, so he read the menu from a local seafood restaurant. He took exception to the tilapia (“That’s, like, pond-grown—that’s the worst”) and to the oyster shooter (“It sounds like a dirty thing to order”), and then turned his attention to the frogs’ legs. He wondered, “How could you not feel bad for the frog when you eat that?” He compared eating frogs’ legs to eating chicken, and soon he was immersed in a philosophical soliloquy about his beloved gray poodle, Teddy:

My dog is only eleven pounds. What’s shocking to me is that my dog’s, like, hindquarter—I looked at it the other day, when he got wet. . . . I looked at his leg. It looked like a large chicken leg. I got frightened. So I said, How could you eat a chicken, and savor it, and the dog’s—I can’t do it.

And I say, then your mind starts running, if you have a kaleidoscopic mind like I do. Like, what if you were starving. Would you eat Teddy?

Don’t even think about it!

I mean, you think about these—would you roast him, how would you eat—

Stop it!

Your mind starts working on you: No, you’re starving. It’s you and Teddy. One of you is gonna die anyway. Would you roast him, would you cook him, would you eat him raw?

Aw, stop it, man!

But your mind starts going there. Am I the only one who thinks this way?

Savage abhors animal cruelty (though not as much as he abhors the animal-rights movement), and, as many listeners know, his interest in the natural world predates his identity as a firebrand: he is a scientist by training, and before he became a talk-show host he was the author of more than a dozen books on alternative medicine. Somehow, the years of research made him not a chipper health nut but a melancholy fatalist, all too aware that every day brings with it a new dose of poison for his beleaguered body. “Theoretically, when I get off the air I should go run, I should walk, I should bicycle, I should do a treadmill,” he told his listeners, while lamenting that he never followed his own advice. He offered a synopsis of the night before: “The worst thing you could do is go to dinner. I went to dinner. The second-worst thing you could do is have two drinks. I had two beers. The third-worst thing you could do is come right home and watch television. I came right home and watched television. I didn’t sleep a minute last night. One nightmare after another.” He sighed. “I’ll do the same thing again tonight.”

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To an observer who lacks Savage’s exquisite irritability, his daily routine might not seem so bad. He records two or three hours of live radio every weekday, starting at 3 P.M., Pacific Time. (The third hour often includes pretaped commentary, as well as dispatches from politically consonant correspondents.) Savage customarily works from a home studio, or a few of them; he likes to remind listeners that he lives and works in three or four “hidden locations.” His main collaborator is his executive producer, Beowulf Rochlen, who is based in Oregon—also the home of Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Savage’s show. Because he worries about hearing loss, Savage refuses to use headphones, so he communicates with Rochlen only during breaks, or by means of brusque instructions and admonitions, delivered on the air. At the syndicator’s insistence, the show is broadcast with a thirty-second delay, so that particularly inflammatory comments can be expunged. Savage likes to talk about his love of jazz, Cuban music, and early rock and roll, but he begins each hour with a rhythmic crunch of distorted guitars: a collage of riffs from Metallica and Mötley Crüe.

On a Monday afternoon this past spring, less than an hour after the live portion of his show had ended, Savage welcomed a guest into one of his hideouts: a beautiful, clutter-free little house overlooking San Francisco Bay. He was wearing wide-legged linen trousers, sandals, and a short-sleeved shirt printed with palm trees. As part of his training in herbal medicine, Savage did botanical research in Fiji, in the nineteen-seventies, and he still looks a bit like the field researcher he used to be. An oil painting in the living room showed the radio host as a young botanist, with a full beard, holding in his left hand the dark, kidney-shaped fruit of the Degeneria vitiensis plant. It was a bright, unseasonably hot day, and he was installed on the back deck, with Teddy, who seemed to be enjoying the heat more than Savage was. An assistant brought out a cold bottle of Beck’s beer, two glasses, and a bowl of salted peanuts.

On his radio show that afternoon, Savage had played tracks by Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, and he sought to draw a line connecting the music he loved as a boy, the herbal medicine he practiced as a young man, and the political philosophy he advocates now: in each case, he said, he was after a kind of freedom, and he said that it was the big-government liberals who had abandoned freedom and, in a broader sense, abandoned him. But successful rabble-rousing requires a certain kind of optimism—a belief that, sooner or later, your compatriots will come to their senses. And part of what makes his radio show so engrossing is its undercurrent of pessimism: Savage never quite seems able to convince himself that the forces of righteousness will prevail; indeed, he often gives voice to a sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t much matter. Sitting on his deck, he cheerfully admitted as much. “I watch shows where they’re digging up a mummy from four thousand years ago, bothering a tomb,” he said. “That person shaved, brushed his teeth with a stick, took a shit, got laid, whatever. And now what? Who the fuck knows what his politics were?” Across the Bay was the Chevron Richmond Refinery, half hidden between the hills and the coast. “If a terrorist blew it up, it’d be the equivalent of ten nuclear bombs,” he said. “I sometimes sit here and think about the fireball.”

Because of his antipathy for liberals and his incendiary style, Savage is sometimes seen as an heir to iconic radio provocateurs of an earlier era, like Father Coughlin, who emerged during the Great Depression as an outspoken critic of both capitalist excess and the Communist menace (he later became a more marginal figure, railing against “Jewish bankers”), and Bob Grant, whose caustic broadcasts made him a star in the nineteen-seventies. But when Savage talks about his chief influences he is most likely to mention the old-timers he listened to as a kid in New York: Symphony Sid, the beloved jazz d.j.; Mel Allen, the old Yankees play-by-play man; Jean Shepherd, the pioneering monologuist. From that perspective, Savage might be merely the latest—and probably one of the last—in a long line of garrulous old-school New York radio personalities. (His sensibility isn’t so far removed from that of Howard Stern, another Jewish kid from New York with a radio show that thrives on provocation and neurosis. But Savage dismisses Stern as both a “sophomoric sensationalist” and—maybe more damaging—a Long Islander.) The form of Savage’s show—the quick cuts from one topic to another, the way familiar political observations give rise to baffling digressions, the fluctuating tension between his blue-state life and his red-state message—is at least as important as its content, which means that it’s hard to understand him, and his appeal, at second hand. The immoderate quotes meticulously catalogued by the liberal media-watchdog site mediamatters.org are accurate but misleading, insofar as they reduce a willfully erratic broadcast to a series of political brickbats. You could say something similar about the four books that Savage has placed on the Times best-seller list, including “The Savage Nation,” which reached No. 1; all are political polemics, and none capture the freewheeling sensibility of the show or the complicated personality of the man.

Last year, while talk radio (and, for that matter, talk TV) was obsessed with campaign minutiae, Savage couldn’t quite decide how much he cared. Despite his fears about Obama, he was lukewarm in his support of Senator John McCain, and frustrated by McCain’s faltering campaign. (Savage calls him John McShame, and often suggests, conspiratorially, that he didn’t really want to beat Obama. “McCain may as well be a fall guy for the new world order,” he said.) He told listeners, “You’ll have to go to one of the other talk-show hosts to get ‘Obama’s a Ma-a-arxist’ and ‘McCain is a wa-a-ar hero,’ ” adding, with a trace of self-pity, “I really don’t care about it anymore.” What he really did care to talk about, more days than not, was his new book, “Psychological Nudity: Savage Radio Stories.” He published it himself, and since last October he has been selling it online, through his Web site. “Psychological Nudity” is essentially a series of transcripts of his broadcasts, but this book is more scattershot than its predecessors, more anarchic. There are seventy-five short chapters full of true (or truish) stories; one is only two paragraphs long, and it is called “Savage Liked Art in Grade School and Hubris in Adults.” It is by far the best book of his career, partly because it’s the least booklike, and partly because it underscores the perverse streak that is among his most appealing qualities. What other political firebrand would self-publish a book of autobiographical anecdotes at the peak of election season?

Now that the Obama era has begun, Savage has been stirred to action by a series of outrages: the Department of Homeland Security report on “right-wing extremism”; the threats to states’ rights; the spectre of creeping socialism. But some of his best broadcasts have little to do with the news. One day, he reminisced about working as a caddie in the Catskills, when he was a teen-ager, and offered a brief and rather capricious history of golf. (“It’s, like, a British thing,” he said. “People had nothing to do with themselves after they pillaged the colonies.”) He wondered if it was going to rain in San Francisco, then stopped himself, saying, “I’m not supposed to talk about weather. It’s one of the rules of a national show, is you can’t talk about anything fun.” That made him think about global warming (“global bull,” he called it), and the fate of the local salmon, and of salmon in general. “It’s gotta swim all the way back, three years later, so it can shoot its sperm on the egg and die,” he said. “What a way to live! I guess that’s why the French call it the petite mort.” That, in turn, reminded him of a “crazy” woman he knew as a child, who was seized by a kind of existential panic: “She took people’s hands, even children, and she’d say, ‘Tell me, why are we born if we have to die? Why did God give me children if they’re gonna die one day?’ ” Like most of his stories, this one didn’t really have an ending. “There’s no answer to it,” he said. “That’s why we’re focussed on politics—to make believe that we don’t care about the eternal questions. This way, we can get mad at the Republicans, or Nixon—you can say Nixon did it. Or you can hate the Democrats, that they did it. You don’t have to face your own problems.” He chuckled, as if he had just remembered that millions of people were listening. “You understand this?”

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Savage was born Michael Alan Weiner, in 1942, the son of Jewish immigrants, and, like many successful men who started off poor, he loves to talk about the bad old days. His father ran an antique shop on Ludlow Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and he put his son to work in the basement, cleaning bronze statues with a toothbrush dipped in a cyanide solution. Apparently, Savage’s father believed in the sort of tough love that resembles love only in retrospect. “It was like an Abraham and Isaac relationship,” he writes, in “Psychological Nudity,” adding, “I think if he had the rock and knife I wouldn’t be here today.” (Later in the book, he compares Abraham to an “Islamo-fascist.”) His mother took care of Michael and, for a time, his younger brother, Jerome, who was “born blind and deaf and unable to hold himself up,” in Savage’s words. On the advice of a doctor, Jerome was institutionalized—“packed off like an animal to live and suffer and die in silence, alone in one New York snake pit after another.”

Although his father tolerated no discussion of religious faith, Savage was raised in a thoroughly Jewish world, and he still winces when he recalls the time he made his sports car backfire in front of the synagogue during Yom Kippur services. (“I mocked my own people and my own religion,” he says now.) Because he is a political ally of evangelical Christians, and because he has changed his name, he is sometimes accused of covering up his Jewish roots, or implicitly renouncing them. In fact, his delivery is so steeped in American Jewish culture that non-Jewish listeners might sometimes wonder what he’s talking about. After the election of 2000, he wrote a scathing ode to southern Florida and its inhabitants. He called it “the land of suntanned Trotskys in delis,” and he lampooned the residents for their loyalty to “Bill, their shameless shaygitz,” and “Al, their Shabbos goy.” Savage was brought up in a family of Democrats, and it’s hard not to read the poem as a complicated homage to his mother, who died in Boca Raton in 2003.

Savage’s childhood instilled in him a fondness for hardworking immigrants, paired with (and sometimes overwhelmed by) a disgust for more recent arrivals who seem to be shirking the responsibilities of citizenship. “Borders, language, and culture” is one of his rallying cries: he believes that, in America, all three are under siege, and he points to “illegals” as one of the prime causes. When news broke of the H1N1 flu outbreak, he played mariachi music while gleefully chronicling the virus’s progress, and mocking the Obama Administration’s refusal to close the borders. But he is also a deeply sentimental man. And so when he noticed that the staff at a local Italian restaurant was “ninety-nine per cent Hispanic people” he was inspired to suggest (on the air, not in the restaurant) the kind of political compromise he usually abhors: “You clean out the thirty per cent of illegal aliens who constitute our prison population, you get rid of the bums on welfare, you cut off free medical care, and I’ll tell you what, then you can give everyone else citizenship, as far as I’m concerned.”

In 1963, Savage graduated from Queens College with a degree in biology and no particular fondness for conservatism. (“Took me a lifetime to figure out I was brainwashed in school,” he says.) He worked briefly as a social worker, and he now says that the job taught him to loathe the welfare state; he became something of a wanderer, and a connoisseur of the counterculture. In New York, he visited Timothy Leary’s Millbrook estate; after he moved to Hawaii, he persuaded Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to come and give a reading. With his wife, Janet Weiner, he settled in the Bay Area in 1974, and he spent years communing with the local beats and hipsters, members of a radical fringe that he now considers a symptom of America’s sickness—and, maybe, the sickness that almost claimed him. He has called Ferlinghetti a “jealous little man,” and he has said that Ginsberg was “the fucking devil.” In “The Savage Nation,” he celebrates the death of an unnamed “beatnik” poet—in fact, it’s Gregory Corso—whom he calls “one of the blights of the human race.”

Even as he was rejecting one counterculture, he was immersing himself in another. In Hawaii, he began his transformation into one of the nation’s foremost herbalists, earning master’s degrees in anthropology and ethnobotany. He brought his wife along on his expeditions to Fiji, where he collected and analyzed local medicinal plants, and in 1978 he earned a degree that sounds like something from a conservative parody of liberal university culture: a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California at Berkeley. As Michael A. Weiner, he built a small empire as a consultant and the author of a string of crunchy advice books: “Plant a Tree”; “Earth Medicine, Earth Food”; “The Art of Feeding Children Well”; “Maximum Immunity.” The books were the fruit of a personal quest: his father had died young (of a heart attack), as had his father’s father and, he later learned, his father’s father’s father; Savage was searching for a way to defy heredity.

Despite the success of the books, he says, he found himself unable to ascend the academic ladder, and he concluded that he was being discriminated against because of his race and his gender. In 1977, he wrote a poem called “The Death of the White Male,” which he distributed as a pamphlet fourteen years later. The poem, which was originally conceived as a plea for help to President Carter, is part manifesto and part job application:

I am the smallest

minority

in America, an individual man,

who aligns himself

with no group,

calls himself

by no race,

but strives always for excellence.

Savage says that over the years his political orientation never really changed, but he hasn’t always identified with conservatism. He says that his difficulties in academia left him feeling “alienated from society,” and helped nudge him out of the liberal orbit. Sather Tower, the main landmark of U.C. Berkeley, is visible from his house, and he is amused by the idea that one lousy tenure-track job might have been enough to prevent him from becoming a radio star. “Had I been given a teaching position, would I have voted for Obama in the last election? I don’t know,” he said. He thought about it. “That’s an interesting question.” He thought some more. “The answer is no,” he said, finally. “Because I detested doctrinaire liberals even then.”

In frustration, he considered moving to Israel. (He visited the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with his wife and children, but couldn’t bring himself to stay there. After a few days, he thought he heard the voice of his father, reproaching him from beyond the grave: “You want to turn your son into an immigrant?”) In the early nineteen-eighties, Savage found work as a nutritionist at a San Francisco clinic that served mainly gay men, and soon he began seeing early signs of an epidemic that didn’t yet have a name: “One of the other doctors, the nicest guy in the world, gets an infection all over his face; he almost goes blind. Then people are starting to get sick. And I’m afraid to wash my hands in the bathroom—I don’t know what the hell it is.” Savage became convinced that gay bathhouses were helping to spread the virus, and he became an advocate of closing them. “That’s when the whole community that I knew turned on me,” he says, still sounding shell-shocked. “They called me ‘Nazi,’ ‘fascist.’ ”

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In 1986, Savage published “Maximum Immunity,” a well-received book on holistic medicine. (In a blurb, Andrew Weil called it a “survival manual for our times.”) The chapter on AIDS begins with a sharp note of criticism: an accusation that the medical establishment is acting “in passive connivance with the homosexual lobby.” This is something Michael A. Weiner wrote, but it also sounds like something Michael Savage might say.

The double trauma of the AIDS epidemic—the disease itself and the political fight over it—turned Savage into a lifelong critic of the gay-rights movement. It also seems to have confirmed his instinctive suspicion of pleasure (“To my father, nothing was fun,” he once said, by way of asking what’s wrong with today’s generation) and his fear of decadence. When he argues against gay marriage, he often expresses a disgust with homosexuality itself—decrying “abominable behavior between men,” for example. This disgust may extend to heterosexuality, too, and his digressions regularly lead him back to the mysterious link between lust and mortality, two different expressions of the same human flaw. “With Viagra and hair transplants, it’s like one continuum from age fifteen till death,” he says. “Everyone has dark hair, false teeth, and can be sexually aroused until they go into the coffin.” Unlike many men, he doesn’t seem to find that an appealing prospect.

By the time he published “The Death of the White Male,” Savage was already starting to turn his discontent into a political program that resembled an amped-up version of modern conservatism. The second printing of the pamphlet includes an invitation for readers to join Savage’s political organization, the Paul Revere Society, which demanded an end to affirmative action and the abolition of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Savage’s son, Russell Goldencloud Weiner, did some work for the Paul Revere Society, and later ran an unsuccessful Republican campaign for the California State Assembly. Russell Weiner had more luck expanding upon his family’s other legacy: with inspiration from his herbalist father, he created Rockstar Energy Drink, a hypercaffeinated beverage that is now distributed by PepsiCo. The company, which is based in Las Vegas, sponsors rock concerts and extreme-sports events, and it is also a family business: Janet Weiner is the chief financial officer. (Earlier this month, in response to pressure from activists, Russell Weiner issued a statement distancing the company from any “offensive” statements made by his father, and pledging a hundred thousand dollars to various gay community organizations.)

Over the years, Savage has noticed that his disdain for the mainstream media is widely reciprocated. He is still annoyed about a 2003 London Times article that suggested that he would go down in history as “an apostle of hatred.” So when he received an e-mail from a journalist asking for an interview he was deeply suspicious. He read the e-mail on the air—he kept the writer anonymous, and he didn’t mention that the request came from The New Yorker—and then asked his listeners, “Should I do the interview or not?” There were four ayes and two nays, one of which came from Jenny in Tucson, who said, “He’s just going to mix a little bit of truth with a little bit of lies and make you look pretty bad. He’s going to try to do a psychological assessment. Don’t do it! Do not do it.”

About a week later, Savage revisited the topic—“my continuing correspondence with a big-shot magazine writer.” He quoted the latest exchanges, along with his tart response, in which he asked, “Why must all of you in the extreme media paint everyone you disagree with as demonic? Why is the homosexual agenda so important to the midstream media?” He confessed that he had tentatively agreed to do the interview, over the objections of his wife. (“She doesn’t trust this guy from a mile away.”) A caller urged him to heed her warning. He laughed. “I won’t take her advice,” he said, adding, “I always make that mistake.”

Gruffness is his birthright, inherited from a father whose tyrannical strictness became less baffling to Savage as he grew older. Unlike his father, though, Savage is something of a softie: a political idealist, a sucker for a sob story, and a firm believer in the power of friendship. When he invited the journalist into one of his undisclosed locations, he proved to be a first-rate host, chatty and solicitous. A steady supply of beer refills lubricated the conversation (one of his earliest books was “The Taster’s Guide to Beer,” which was published in 1977), and as the temperature dropped and the sky above Berkeley started to turn orange he seemed to be working hard to stay suspicious, despite himself. On his show the next day, a caller asked how the interview had gone, and Savage described his interlocutor: “If I told you he looked like Obama, I wouldn’t be far from the truth.” Coming from him, this sounded like a deeply twisted compliment.

Savage started his radio career in 1994, when, after years of flogging his books on other people’s shows, he got himself a tryout on a local station, KGO, filling in for Ray Taliaferro, a liberal African-American commentator whose late-night show is something of a Bay Area institution. He spent a few hours talking about the dangers of affirmative action and illegal immigration, and he says that listeners responded with phone calls that were so vituperative they made him paranoid; driving home in the early hours of the morning, he was afraid someone was following him. He resolved that his radio experiment was over, but the station lured him back for a daytime tryout, which went better, and in 1995 he got his own show, which made him a kind of local antihero, known (and, in certain quarters, beloved) for assailing the liberal culture that dominated the city. By 2000, radio stations around the country were broadcasting him. On the air, he used a new name that made reference to his old life: he called himself Michael Savage, after Charles Savage, the nineteenth-century explorer who introduced guns to Fiji.

His timing was perfect. Conservative talk radio, in its third or fourth or fifth generation, surged anew in the late eighties, after the Federal Communications Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which had required radio stations to provide balanced commentary on controversial topics. (Many talk-radio hosts say they fear that the Obama Administration might revive the Fairness Doctrine, or some variant of it.) During the Clinton years, AM radio was home to principled dissent and conspiracy theories, lively satire and dark premonition. In the nineteen-nineties, small-government conservatism sometimes rubbed elbows with more radical philosophies, and on the radio (especially on G. Gordon Liddy’s show, which had a peculiar hypnotic power) the political debates of the day sometimes took on a distinctly esoteric flavor: dark mutterings about the death of Vince Foster, commiseration for the Branch Davidians who were killed by federal agents in Waco, sympathy for the militia movement. These days, you can hear traces of this subterranean sensibility in the voice of Glenn Beck, who conjured a mystical fervor when he said, “They don’t surround us at all. We surround them.”

Now, as in the nineties, the most resonant voice belongs to Limbaugh, who still dominates the conservative talk market that he helped create. His rise stoked demand for more or less like-minded hosts, because radio stations wanted shows to program alongside his—or, sometimes, against his. (Savage began his career by declaring himself to be “to the right of Rush and to the left of God.”) And, despite his political prominence, Limbaugh’s main legacy might be his media criticism. From the start, it often seemed that his primary target wasn’t so much liberal politicians as it was the old-media titans who, in his view, feigned objectivity while working to further their own agendas. His sustained critique helped erode the traditional authority of network news and big newspapers, and also helped undermine the concept of disinterested journalism. There was something postmodern about his insistence that journalists were just another interest group, and that “the news” had its own ideology. Fittingly, he delivered his observations in an orotund voice that was simultaneously an expression of big-media arrogance and, subtly, a parody of it. (Think of his mischievously anodyne slogan “Excellence in Broadcasting.”) This was Limbaugh’s clever way of acknowledging the paradox of his position as a media skeptic asking for listeners’ trust, and it was his way of addressing the weighty questions that any radio personality must face: Who do you think you are? And who do you think you’re talking to?

“Human Resources wants to know if you still wish to identify with the gender on your birth certificate.”

While Limbaugh addresses the faithful, sometimes with a wink, Savage’s show is self-conscious in a different way. He freely acknowledges the difference between his life on the radio and his life off it. (“Twenty-one hours a day I live in misery,” he once said, when he was feeling unusually cheerful, or unusually glum—it can be hard to tell. “Three hours a day I’m happy.”) And he keeps listeners apprised of his rapidly shifting emotions and of his various states of physical not-quite-wellness. During one memorable broadcast, he opened his mail and found an envelope from a relative containing a picture of his father. “I’m older than he was when he died,” Savage said, and then he held forth on the inherent certainty and uncertainty of death. He sounded rattled. “I ate nuts during the break, I got this picture, now I’m having palpitations,” he said. Trying to recover, he briefly discussed Sunnis and Shiites (“I don’t ever want to know the difference”), but found himself distracted, again, by the photograph. “He looked good—look at him,” Savage said, as if he were expecting his listeners to agree. “Lotta good it did him.”

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In March, Savage turned sixty-seven. “Never thought I’d live this long,” he says. He has now lasted a full decade longer than his father did, and he seems to feel that somehow this can’t be good news. When he was a boy, his father gave him some instructions that he never forgot. “He said to me, ‘When I die, you can throw me in a garbage can.’ I mean, it shocked the hell out of me—it really freaked me out. The idea of throwing my poor father in a garbage can?” This unsentimental request was also, in a way, a metaphysical brainteaser: Savage was being asked to choose between honoring his father’s wishes and honoring his father’s body, between obeying him and celebrating him.

Although his father was a devout materialist, Savage seems to have spent much of his life searching for the right way to articulate his Jewish heritage. For a time, in the eighties, he attended Friday-night services at the Chabad House in Berkeley. And he loves to talk about his well-worn Hebrew Bible, which is full of annotations and Post-it notes. Despite his alliance with evangelical Christians, he seems untempted by Christianity itself. “You go to a graveyard, and someone’s dead, and they give the mumbo-jumbo,” he told his listeners one afternoon. “You want to believe the Resurrection. Do you actually believe it? Many of you do.” But, on another afternoon, he riffled through the Book of Revelation in an attempt to explain the latest perfidies of the Obama Administration. “We now have a prophecy emerging in front of our eyes,” he said.

When Savage gets really apocalyptic, it can be hard to separate his political observations from his medical complaints, and maybe he’s not quite convinced that they really are separate. Recently, he has had vision problems, which have come to acquire a symbolic significance. “I feel as though, almost, I’m losing my sight from looking every day at such horror,” he says. “I feel as though my eyes are closing on me, because they don’t want to see it anymore.” When he talks on the air about his homes in “hidden locations,” he suggests that he’s worried about some crazed liberal assassinating him. “I have to watch out for them, because they’re all psychopaths,” he says. Listen to Savage long enough and you may be persuaded to think that liberalism is code for all the stupid things we just can’t conquer: weakness and decadence and human frailty and death itself.

Near the end of “Psychological Nudity,” Savage writes, “I’m watching the sands of time fall into the hourglass. There’s more sand on the bottom now than there is on the top.” And he makes reference to his own death with startling frequency: a few times an hour, week after week. Just about anything can set him off. A beautiful pair of Shetland sheepdogs in the mall reminds him of the dogs’ kindly owner, which in turn reminds him of unkind dog owners, which makes him think about Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation, which brings to mind dead dogs, which leads him, inexorably, to a consideration of “the old boxeroo, waiting at the end of the road for all of us.” His thoughts on dying are often informed by Buddhist theories of enlightenment and reincarnation, and during one digression he staged his own afterlife as an improvised two-character dramatic scene:

GOD: There is no time. The whole thing is all a racket. There’s no time. Clocks have no meaning, Dali was closer to the truth: they’re all bent. Because the hands move but nothing else moves. So here’s what it is, Mike, you’re gonna be reborn again in Mt. Sinai Hospital, in the year you were born, to the exact same parents, and you’re gonna go through the very same life again.

MICHAEL SAVAGE (deceased): No! I don’t want that!

GOD: Why? It was so bad? You want me to make you a bug?

SAVAGE: No, but do I have to do that all—everything, again? The meatball on the wall, the whole thing, the fights in grade school, all over again? Love by the sewer plant, the nympho in Alley Pond Park, affirmative action, the radio career?

GOD: Why, that wasn’t good enough for you? Would you like something else?

SAVAGE: No, God. I’ll take it.

Savage is still preoccupied with the death of the white male—only now he’s worried about one in particular. Being on the radio makes him feel “immortal,” he says, but talk radio, an old format that has already outlived its era, is an impractical way to cheat death. Even in an age when every broadcast is recorded and archived, all those thousands of hours of oration don’t have much of an afterlife. Talk radio is meant to be consumed in real time, as a running commentary on the issues and outrages of the day. It provides its stars with a funny sort of immortality: one that lasts only as long as they keep talking.

This year, Savage is celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of his radio career. On the air one day, he marked the occasion in typically perverse fashion: by thinking of all the listeners who stuck around, and all the ones who didn’t. “Some were fifteen, they’re now thirty,” he said. “Some were five, they’re now twenty. They grew up on me. Their fathers are dead; the guys who had it playing in the car are gone. They’re still here, they can’t believe it. I’m their voice of freedom. I’m the last hope. I’m the beacon. I’m the Statue of Liberty. I’m Michael Savage. I’ll be back.” ♦